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THE RIGHT TO THE CITY 
 
David Harvey 
 
 
 “CHANGE THE WORLD” SAID MARX; “CHANGE LIFE” SAID RIMBAUD; FOR US, THESE TWO 
TASKS ARE IDENTICAL (André Bretton) - (A banner in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the City of 
Mexico, site of the student massacre in 1968, January, 2008) 
 
 
 
We live in an era when ideals of human rights have moved center stage both politically and ethically. 
A lot of political energy is put into promoting, protecting and articulating their significance in the 
construction of a better world. For the most part the concepts circulating are individualistic and property-
based and, as such, do nothing to fundamentally challenge hegemonic liberal and neoliberal market logics 
and neoliberal modes of legality and state action. We live in a world, after all, where the rights of private 
property and the profit rate trump all other notions of rights one can think of. But there are occasions when 
the ideal of human rights takes a collective turn, as when the rights of labor, women, gays and minorities 
come to the fore (a legacy of the long-standing labor movement and the 1960s Civil Rights movement in 
the United States that was collective and had a global resonance). These struggles for collective rights 
have, on occasion, yielded some results (such that a woman and a black become real contestants for the US 
Presidency). I here want to explore another kind of collective right, that of the right to the city. This is 
important because there is a revival of interest in Henri Lefebvre’s ideas on the topic as these were 
articulated in relation to the movement of ’68 in France, at the same time as there are various social 
movements around the world that are now demanding the right to the city as their goal. So what might the 
right to the city mean? 
 The city, as the noted urban sociologist Robert Park once wrote, is: 
"man's most consistent and on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more 
after his heart's desire. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is 
henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in 
making the city man has remade himself."1 
If Park is correct, then the question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from the question of 
what kind of people we want to be, what kinds of social relations we seek, what relations to nature we 
cherish, what style of daily life we desire, what kinds of technologies we deem appropriate, what aesthetic 
values we hold. The right to the city is, therefore, far more than a right of individual access to the resources 
that the city embodies: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city more after our heart’s desire. It 
is, moreover, a collective rather than an individual right since changing the city inevitably depends upon 
the exercise of a collective power over the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake 
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ourselves and our cities is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human 
rights. 
But since, as Park avers, we have hitherto lacked any clear sense of the nature of our task, we must 
first reflect on how we have been made and re-made throughout history by an urban process impelled 
onwards by powerful social forces. The astonishing pace and scale of urbanization over the last hundred 
years means, for example, we have been re-made several times over without knowing why, how or 
wherefore. Has this contributed to human well-being? Has it made us into better people or left us dangling 
in a world of anomie and alienation, anger and frustration? Have we become mere monads tossed around 
in an urban sea? These were the sorts of questions that preoccupied all manner of nineteenth century 
commentators, such as Engels and Simmel, who offered perceptive critiques of the urban personas then 
emerging in response to rapid urbanization.2 These days it is not hard to enumerate all manner of urban 
discontents and anxieties in the midst of even more rapid urban transformations. Yet we seem to lack the 
stomach for systematic critique. What, for example, are we to make of the immense concentrations of 
wealth, privilege and consumerism in almost all the cities of the world in the midst of an exploding “planet 
of slums”?3 
To claim the right to the city in the sense I mean it here is to claim some kind of shaping power over 
the processes of urbanization, over the ways in which our cities are made and re-made and to do so in a 
fundamental and radical way. From their very inception, cities have arisen through the geographical and 
social concentrations of a surplus product. Urbanization has always been, therefore, a class phenomena of 
some sort, since surpluses have been extracted from somewhere and from somebody (usually an oppressed 
peasantry) while the control over the disbursement of the surplus typically lies in a few hands. This general 
situation persists under capitalism, of course, but in this case there is an intimate connection with the 
perpetual search for surplus value (profit) that drives the capitalist dynamic. To produce surplus value, 
capitalists have to produce a surplus product. Since urbanization depends on the mobilization of a surplus 
product an inner connection emerges between the development of capitalism and urbanization. 
Let us look more closely at what capitalists do. They begin the day with a certain amount of money 
and end the day with more of it. The next day they wake up and have to decide what to do with the extra 
money they gained the day before. They face a Faustian dilemma: reinvest to get even more money or 
consume their surplus away in pleasures. The coercive laws of competition force them to reinvest because 
if one does not reinvest then another surely will. To remain a capitalist, some surplus must be reinvested to 
make even more surplus. Successful capitalists usually make more than enough surplus to reinvest in 
expansion and satisfy their lust for pleasure too. But the result of perpetual reinvestment is the expansion of 
surplus production at a compound rate - hence all the logistical growth curves (money, capital, output and 
population) that attach to the history of capital accumulation. This is paralleled by the logistical growth 
path of urbanization under capitalism. 
The politics of capitalism are affected by the perpetual need to find profitable terrains for capital 
surplus production and absorption. In this the capitalist faces a number of barriers to continuous and 
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trouble-free expansion. If there is a scarcity of labor and wages are too high then either existing labor has 
to be disciplined (technologically induced unemployment or an assault on organized working class power 
are two prime methods) or fresh labor forces must be found (by immigration, export of capital or 
proletarianization of hitherto independent elements in the population). New means of production in general 
and new natural resources in particular must also be found. This puts increasing pressure on the natural 
environment to yield up the necessary raw materials and absorb the inevitable wastes. Terrains for raw 
material extraction have to be opened up (imperialist and neo-colonial endeavors often have this as their 
objective). The coercive laws of competition also force new technologies and organizational forms to come 
on line all the time, since capitalists with higher productivity can out-compete those using inferior methods. 
Innovations define new wants and needs, reduce the turnover time of capital through speed up and reduce 
the friction of distance that limits the geographical range withinwhich the capitalist is free to search for 
expanded labor supplies, raw materials, etc. If there is not enough purchasing power in the market then 
new markets must be found by expanding foreign trade, promoting new products and lifestyles, creating 
new credit instruments and debt-financed state and private expenditures. If, finally, the profit rate is too 
low, then state regulation of “ruinous competition,” monopolization (mergers and acquisitions) and capital 
exports to fresh pastures provide ways out. 
If any one of the above barriers to continuous capital circulation and expansion becomes impossible 
to circumvent, then capital accumulation is blocked and capitalists face a crisis. Capital cannot be 
profitably re-invested. Capital accumulation stagnates or ceases and capital is devalued (lost) and in some 
instances even physically destroyed. Devaluation can take a number of forms. Surplus commodities can 
be devalued or destroyed, productive capacity and the assets can be written down in value and left 
unemployed, or money itself can be devalued through inflation. And in a crisis, of course, labor stands to 
be devalued through massive unemployment. In what ways, then, has capitalist urbanization been driven 
by the need to circumvent these barriers and to expand the terrain of profitable capitalist activity? I here 
argue that it plays a particularly active role (along with other phenomenon such as military expenditures) in 
absorbing the surplus product that capitalists are perpetually producing in their search for surplus value.4 
Consider, first, the case of Second Empire Paris. The crisis of 1848 was one of the first clear crises 
of unemployed surplus capital and surplus labor side-by-side and it was European-wide. It struck 
particularly hard in Paris and the result was an abortive revolution on the part of unemployed workers and 
those bourgeois utopians who saw a social republic as the antidote to the capitalist greed and inequality that 
had characterized the July Monarchy. The republican bourgeoisie violently repressed the revolutionaries 
but failed to resolve the crisis. The result was the ascent to power of Napoleon Bonaparte, who engineered 
a coup in 1851 and proclaimed himself Emperor in 1852. To survive politically, the authoritarian Emperor 
resorted to widespread political repression of alternative political movements but he also knew that he had 
to deal with the capital surplus problem and this he did by announcing a vast program of infrastructural 
investment both at home and abroad. Abroad this meant the construction of railroads throughout Europe 
and down into the Orient as well as support for grand works such as the Suez Canal. At home it meant 
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consolidating the railway network, building ports and harbors, draining marshes, and the like. But above 
all it entailed the reconfiguration of the urban infrastructure of Paris. Bonaparte brought Haussmann to 
Paris to take charge of the public works in 1853. 
Haussmann clearly understood that his mission was to help solve the surplus capital and 
unemployment problem by way of urbanization. The rebuilding of Paris absorbed huge quantities of labor 
and of capital by the standards of the time and, coupled with authoritarian suppression of the aspirations of 
the Parisian labor force, was a primary vehicle of social stabilization. Haussmann drew upon the utopian 
plans (by Fourierists and Saint-Simonians) for re-shaping Paris that had been debated in the 1840s, but with 
one big difference. He transformed the scale at which the urban process was imagined. When the architect 
Hittorf, showed Haussmann his plans for a new boulevard, Haussmann threw them back at him saying “not 
wide enough…you have it 40 meters wide and I want it 120.” Haussmann thought of the city on a grander 
scale, annexed the suburbs, redesigned whole neighborhoods (such as Les Halles) rather than just bits and 
pieces of the urban fabric. He changed the city wholesale rather than retail. To do this he needed new 
financial institutions and debt instruments which were constructed on Saint-Simonian lines (the Credit 
Mobiliér and Credit Immobiliére). What he did in effect was to help resolve the capital surplus disposal 
problem by setting up a Keynesian-like system of debt-financed infrastructural urban improvements. 
The system worked very well for some fifteen years and it entailed not only a transformation of 
urban infrastructures but the construction of a whole new urban way of life and the construction of a new 
kind of urban persona. Paris became “the city of light” the great center of consumption, tourism and 
pleasure - the cafés, the department stores, the fashion industry, the grand expositions all changed the urban 
way of life in ways that could absorb vast surpluses through crass and frivolous consumerism (that 
offended traditionalists and excluded workers alike). But then the overextended and increasingly 
speculative financial system and credit structures on which this was based crashed in 1868. Haussmann 
was forced from power, Napoleon III in desperation went to war against Bismarck’s Germany and lost, and 
in the vacuum that followed arose the Paris Commune, one of the greatest revolutionary episodes in 
capitalist urban history. The Commune was wrought in part out of a nostalgia for the urban world that 
Haussmann had destroyed (shades of the 1848 revolution) and the desire to take back their city on the part 
of those dispossessed by Haussmann’s works. But the Commune also articulated conflictual forward 
looking visions of alternative socialist (as opposed to monopoly capitalist) modernities that pitted ideals of 
centralized hierarchical control (the Jacobin current) against decentralized anarchist visions of popular 
organization (led by the Proudhonists), that led in 1872, in the midst of intense recriminations over who 
was at fault for the debacle of the Commune, to the radical and unfortunate break between the Marxists and 
the Anarchists that to this day still plague all forms of left opposition to capitalism.5 
Fast forward now to 1942 in the United States. The capital surplus disposal problem that had 
seemed so intractable in the 1930s (and the unemployment that went with it) was temporarily resolved by 
the huge mobilization for the war effort. But everyone was fearful as to what would happen after the war. 
Politically the situation was dangerous. The Federal Government was in effect running a nationalized 
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economy, was in alliance with the communist Soviet Union and strong social movements with socialist 
inclinations had emerged in the 1930s. We all know the subsequent history of the politics of McCarthyism 
and the Cold War (abundant signs of which were already there in 1942). Like Louis Bonaparte, a hefty 
dose of political repression was evidently called for by the ruling classes of the time. But what of the 
capital surplus disposal problem? 
In 1942 there appeared a lengthy evaluation of Haussmann’s efforts in an architectural journal. It 
documented in detail what he has done, attempted an analysis of his mistakes but sought to recuperate 
Haussmann’s reputation as one of the greatest urbanists of all time. The article was by none other than 
Robert Moses who after World War II did to the whole New York metropolitan region what Haussmann 
had done to Paris.6 That is, Moses changed the scale of thinking about the urban process and through the 
system of (debt-financed) highways and infrastructural transformations, through suburbanization and 
through the total re-engineering, not just of the city but of the whole metropolitan region, he absorbed the 
surplus product and thereby helped resolve the capital surplus absorptionproblem. For this to happen, he 
needed to tap into new financial institutions and tax arrangements (subsidies to homeownership) that 
liberated the credit to debt-finance the urban expansion. This process, when taken nation-wide, as it was in 
all the major metropolitan centers of the United States (yet another transformation of scale), played a 
crucial role in the stabilization of global capitalism after World War II (this was a period when the US 
could afford to power the whole global non-communist economy through running trade deficits). The 
suburbanization of the United States was not merely a matter of new infrastructures. As happened in 
Second Empire Paris, it entailed a radical transformation in lifestyles and produced a whole new way of life 
in which new products from housing to refrigerators and air conditioners as well as two cars in the 
driveway and an enormous increase in the consumption of oil, all played their part in the absorption of the 
surplus. It also altered the political landscape as subsidized homeownership for the middle classes changed 
the focus of community action towards the defense of property values and individualized identities (turning 
the suburban vote towards conservative republicanism). In any case, it was argued, debt-encumbered 
homeowners are less likely to go on strike. This project succeeded in absorbing the surplus and assuring 
social stability, albeit at the cost of hollowing out the central cities and generating a so-called urban crisis 
of revolts in many US central cities of impacted minorities (chiefly African-American) who were denied 
access to the new prosperity. 
This lasted until the end of the 1960s when, as happened to Haussmann, a different kind of crisis 
began to unfold such that Moses fell from grace and his solutions came to be seen as inappropriate and 
unacceptable. To begin with the central cities were in revolt. Traditionalists rallied around Jane Jacobs and 
sought to counter the brutal modernism of Moses’ projects with a localized neighborhood aesthetic. But the 
suburbs had been built and the radical transformation in lifestyle that this betokened had all manner of 
social consequences, leading feminists, for example, to proclaim the suburb and its lifestyle as the locus of 
all their primary discontents. And if the Haussmanization of Paris had a role in explaining the dynamics of 
the Paris Commune so the soulless qualities of suburban living played a critical role in the dramatic 
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movements of 1968 in the USA, as discontented white middle class students went into a phase of revolt, 
seeking alliances with marginalized groups claiming civil rights in the central cities and rallying against US 
imperialism to create a movement to build another kind of world including a different kind of urban 
experience. In Paris the movement to stop the left bank expressway and the invasion of central Paris and 
the destruction of traditional neighborhoods by the invading “high rise giants” of which the Place d’Italie 
and the Tour Montparnasse were exemplary, played an important role in animating the grander processes of 
the ’68 revolt. And it was in this context that Lefebvre wrote his prescient text in which he predicted, 
among other things, not only that the urban process was crucial to the survival of capitalism and therefore 
bound to become a crucial focus of political and class struggle, but that this process was step by step 
obliterating the distinctions between town and country through the production of integrated spaces across 
the national space if not beyond.7 The right to the city had to mean the right to command the whole urban 
process that was increasingly dominating the countryside (everything from agribusiness to second homes 
and rural tourism). 
 But along with the ‘68 revolt, part nostalgia for what had been lost and part forward looking asking 
for the construction of a different kind of urban experience, went a financial crisis in the credit institutions 
that had powered the property boom through debt-financing throughout the preceding decades. This crisis 
gathered momentum at the end of the 1960s until the whole capitalist system crashed into a major global 
crisis, led by the bursting of the global property market bubble in 1973, followed by the fiscal bankruptcy 
of New York City in 1975. The dark days of the 1970s were upon us and, as had happened many times 
before, the question now was how to rescue capitalism from its own contradictions and in this, if history 
was to be any guide, the urban process was bound to play a significant role. In this case, as Bill Tabb long 
ago argued, the working through of the New York fiscal crisis of 1975 pioneered the way towards the 
construction of a neoliberal answer to the problems of perpetuation of class power and revival of a capacity 
to absorb the surpluses that capitalism must produce if it is to survive.8 
Fast forward once again to our current conjuncture. International capitalism has been on a roller-
coaster of regional crises and crashes (East and SouthEast Asia in 1997-8; Russia in 1998; Argentina in 
2001, etc.) but has so far avoided a global crash even in the face of a chronic capital surplus disposal 
problem. What has been the role of urbanization in the stabilization of this situation? In the United States it 
is accepted wisdom that the housing market has been an important stabilizer of the economy, particularly 
since 2000 or so (after the high-tech crash of the late 1990s) although it was an active component of 
expansion during the 1990s. The property market has absorbed a great deal of the surplus capital directly 
through new construction (both inner city and suburban housing and new office spaces) while the rapid 
inflation of housing asset prices backed by a profligate wave of mortgage refinancing at historically low 
rates of interest boosted the U.S. internal market for consumer goods and services. The global market has in 
part been stabilized through US urban expansion as the U.S. runs huge trade deficits with the rest of the 
world, borrowing around $2 billion a day to fuel its insatiable consumerism and the debt financed war in 
Afghanistan and Iraq. 
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 But the urban process has undergone another transformation of scale. It has, in short, gone global. 
So we cannot focus merely on the United States. Similar property market booms in Britain and Spain, as 
well as in many other countries, have helped power the capitalist dynamic in ways that have broadly 
paralleled what has happened in the United States. The urbanization of China over the last twenty years 
has been of a different character (with its heavy focus on building infrastructures), but even more important 
than that of the USA. Its pace picked up enormously after a brief recession in 1997 or so, such that China 
has absorbed nearly half of the world’s cement supplies since 2000. More than a hundred cities have 
passed the one million population mark in the last twenty years and small villages, like Shenzhen, have 
become huge metropolises with 6 to 10 million people. Vast infrastructural projects, such as dams and 
highways – again, all debt financed – are transforming the landscape.9 The consequences for the global 
economy and the absorption of surplus capital have been significant: Chile booms because of the demand 
for copper, Australia thrives and even Brazil and Argentina recover in part because of the strength of 
demand from China for raw materials. Is the urbanization of China the primary stabilizer of global 
capitalism? The answer has to be a partial yes. But China is only the epicenter for an urbanization process 
that has now become genuinely global in part through the astonishing global integrationof financial 
markets that use their flexibility to debt-finance urban mega-projects from Dubai to Sao Paulo and from 
Mumbai to Hong Kong and London. The Chinese central bank, for example, has been active in the 
secondary mortgage market in the USA while Goldman Sachs has been heavily involved in the surging 
property market in Mumbai and Hong Kong capital has invested in Baltimore. Every urban area in the 
world has its building boom in full swing in the midst of a flood of impoverished migrants that is 
simultaneously creating a planet of slums. The building booms are evident in Mexico City, Santiago in 
Chile, in Mumbai, Johannesburg, Seoul, Taipei, Moscow, and all over Europe (Spain being most dramatic) 
as well as in the cities of the core capitalist countries such as London, Los Angeles, San Diego and New 
York (where more large-scale urban projects are in motion than ever before and where, just to set the tenor 
of the times, a recent exhibition sought to rehabilitate Moses as the author of the rise of New York City 
rather than the agent of its fall, as Robert Caro had depicted it back in 197410). Astonishing and in some 
respects criminally absurd mega-urbanization projects have emerged in the Middle East in places like 
Dubai and Abu Dhabi as a way of mopping up the surpluses arising from oil wealth in the most 
conspicuous, socially unjust and environmentally wasteful ways possible (like an indoor ski slope). We are 
here looking at yet another transformation in scale, one that makes it hard to grasp that what may be going 
on globally is in principle similar to the processes that Haussmann managed so expertly for a while in 
Second Empire Paris. 
This global urbanization boom has depended, as did all the others before it, on the construction of 
new financial institutions and arrangements to organize the credit required to sustain it. Financial 
innovations set in train in the 1980s, particularly the securitization and packaging of local mortgages for 
sale to investors world-wide, and the setting up of new financial institutions to hold collateralized debt 
obligations, has played a crucial role. The benefits of this were legion: it spread risk and permitted surplus 
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savings pools easier access to surplus housing demand and it also, by virtue of its coordinations, brought 
aggregate interest rates down (while generating immense fortunes for the financial intermediaries who 
worked these wonders). But spreading risk does not eliminate risk. Furthermore, the fact that risk can be 
spread so widely encourages even riskier local behaviors because the risk can be transferred elsewhere. 
Without adequate risk assessment controls, the mortgage market got out of hand and what happened to the 
Pereire Brothers in 1867-8 and to the fiscal profligacy of New York City in the early 1970s, has now turned 
into a so-called sub-prime mortgage and housing asset-value crisis. The crisis is concentrated in the first 
instance in and around US cities with particularly serious implications for low-income African Americans 
and single head-of-household women in the inner cities. It also affects those who, unable to afford the sky-
rocketing housing prices in the urban centers, particularly in the US Southwest, were forced to the semi-
periphery of metropolitan areas to take up speculatively built tract housing at initially easy rates but who 
now face escalating commuting costs with rising oil prices and soaring mortgage payments as the market-
rates click in. This crisis, with vicious local impacts on urban life and infrastructures, also threatens the 
whole architecture of the global financial system and may trigger a major recession to boot. The parallels 
with the 1970s are, to put it mildly, uncanny (including the immediate easy-money response of the US 
Federal Reserve in 2007-8, which is almost certain to generate strong currents of uncontrollable inflation if 
not stagflation, as happened in the 1970s through similar moves, in the not too distant future). 
But the situation is far more complex now and it is an open question as to whether a serious crash in 
the United States can be compensated for elsewhere (e.g. by China, although even here the pace of 
urbanization seems to be slowing down). But the financial system is also much more tightly coupled than it 
ever was before.11 Computer-driven split-second trading, once it does go off track, always threatens to 
create some great divergence in the market (it is already producing incredible volatility in stock markets) 
that will produce a massive crisis requiring a total re-think of how finance capital and money markets work, 
including in relation to urbanization processes. 
As in all the preceding phases, this most recent radical expansion of the urban process has brought 
with it incredible transformations of lifestyle. Quality of urban life has become a commodity for those with 
money, as has the city itself in a world where consumerism, tourism, cultural and knowledge-based 
industries have become major aspects of urban political economy. The postmodernist penchant for 
encouraging the formation of market niches, both in urban lifestyle choices and in consumer habits, and 
cultural forms, surrounds the contemporary urban experience with an aura of freedom of choice in the 
market, provided you have the money. Shopping malls, multiplexes and box stores proliferate (the 
production of each has become big business) as do fast food and artisanal market places, boutique cultures 
and, as Sharon Zukin cutely puts it, “pacification by cappuccino.” Even the incoherent, bland and 
monotonous suburban tract development that continues to dominate in many areas, now gets its antidote in 
a “new urbanism” movement that touts the sale of community and a boutique lifestyle as a developer 
product to fulfill urban dreams. This is a world in which the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive 
individualism and its cognate of political withdrawal of support for collective forms of action can become 
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the template for human personality socialization.12 The defense of property values becomes of paramount 
political interest such that, as Mike Davis points out, the homeowner associations in the state of California 
become bastions of political reaction if not of fragmented neighborhood fascisms.13 
But we also increasingly live in divided, fragmented and conflict-prone cities. How we view the 
world and define possibilities depends on which side of the tracks we are on and to what kinds of 
consumerism we have access to. In the past decades, the neoliberal turn has restored class power to rich 
elites.14 Fourteen billionaires have emerged in Mexico since the neoliberal turn and Mexico now boasts the 
richest man on earth, Carlos Slim, at the same time as the incomes of the poor have either stagnated or 
diminished. The results are indelibly etched into the spatial forms of our cities, which increasingly become 
cities of fortified fragments, of gated communities and privatized public spaces kept under constant 
surveillance. In the developing world in particular, the city: 
“is splitting into different separated parts, with the apparent formation of many “microstates.” Wealthy 
neighborhoods provided with all kinds of services, such as exclusive schools, golf courses, tennis courts 
and private police patrolling the area around the clock intertwine with illegal settlements where water is 
available only at public fountains, no sanitation system exists, electricity is pirated by a privileged few, the 
roads become mud streams whenever it rains, and where house-sharing is the norm. Each fragment appears 
to live and function autonomously, sticking firmly to what it has been able to grab in thedaily fight for 
survival.”15 
Under these conditions, ideals of urban identity, citizenship and belonging, already threatened by the 
spreading malaise of the neoliberal ethic, become much harder to sustain. The privatization of 
redistribution through criminal activity threatens individual security at every turn prompting popular 
demands for police suppressions. Even the idea that the city might function as a collective body politic, a 
site within and from which progressive social movements might emanate, appears increasingly implausible. 
Yet there are in fact all manner of urban social movements in evidence seeking to overcome the isolations 
and to re-shape the city in a different social image to that given by the powers of developers backed by 
finance, corporate capital, and an increasingly entrepreneurially minded local state apparatus. 
But surplus absorption through urban transformation has an even darker aspect. It has entailed 
repeated bouts of urban restructuring through “creative destruction.” This nearly always has a class 
dimension since it is usually the poor, the underprivileged and those marginalized from political power that 
suffer first and foremost from this process. Violence is required to achieve the new urban world on the 
wreckage of the old. Haussmann tore through the old Parisian slums, using powers of expropriation for 
supposedly public benefit and did so in the name of civic improvement and renovation. He deliberately 
engineered the removal of much of the working class and other unruly elements from Paris’s city center 
where they constituted a threat to public order and political power. He created an urban form where it was 
believed (incorrectly as it turned out in 1871) sufficient levels of surveillance and military control were 
possible so as to ensure that revolutionary movements could easily be controlled by military power. But, as 
Engels pointed out in 1872: 
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“In reality, the bourgeoisie has only one method of solving the housing question after its fashion – 
that is to say, of solving it in such a way that the solution perpetually renews the question anew. This 
method is called ‘Haussmann’ (by which) I mean the practice that has now become general of making 
breaches in the working class quarters of our big towns, and particularly in areas which are centrally 
situated, quite apart from whether this is done from considerations of public health or for beautifying the 
town, or owing to the demand for big centrally situated business premises, or, owing to traffic 
requirements, such as the laying down of railways, streets (which sometimes seem to have the aim of 
making barricade fighting more difficult)….No matter how different the reasons may be, the result is 
always the same; the scandalous alleys disappear to the accompaniment of lavish self-praise by the 
bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success, but they appear again immediately somewhere 
else…..The breeding places of disease, the infamous holes and cellars in which the capitalist mode of 
production confines our workers night after night, are not abolished; they are merely shifted elsewhere! 
The same economic necessity that produced them in the first place, produces them in the next place.” 16 
Actually it took more than a hundred years to complete the embourgeoisment of central Paris with 
the consequences that we have seen in recent years of uprisings and mayhem in those isolated suburbs 
within which the marginalized immigrants and the unemployed workers and youth are increasingly trapped. 
The sad point here, of course, is that the processes Engels described recur again and again in capitalist 
urban history. Robert Moses “took a meat axe to the Bronx” (in his infamous words) and long and loud 
were the lamentations of neighborhood groups and movements, that eventually coalesced around the 
rhetoric of Jane Jacobs, at both the unimaginable destruction of valued urban fabric but also of whole 
communities of residents and their long-established networks of social integration.17 But in the New York 
and Parisian case, once the brutal power of state expropriations had been successfully resisted and 
contained, a far more insidious and cancerous process of transformation occurred through fiscal 
disciplining of democratic urban governments, land markets, property speculation and the sorting of land to 
those uses that generated the highest possible financial rate of return under the land’s “highest and best 
use.” Engels understood all too well what this process was about too: 
“The growth of the big modern cities gives the land in certain areas, particularly in those areas which 
are centrally situated, an artificially and colossally increasing value; the buildings erected on these areas 
depress this value instead of increasing it, because they no longer belong to the changed circumstances. 
They are pulled down and replaced by others. This takes place above all with worker’s houses which are 
situated centrally and whose rents, even with the greatest overcrowding, can never, or only very slowly, 
increase above a certain maximum. They are pulled down and in their stead shops, warehouses and public 
building are erected.”18 
It is depressing to think that all of this was written in 1872, for Engels’ description applies directly to 
contemporary urban processes in much of Asia (Delhi, Seoul, Mumbai) as well as to the contemporary 
gentrification of Harlem in New York. A process of displacement and what I call “accumulation by 
dispossession” also lies at the core of the urban process under capitalism.19 It is the mirror image of capital 
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absorption through urban redevelopment and is giving rise to all manner of conflicts over the capture of 
high value land from low income populations that may have lived there for many years. Consider the case 
of Mumbai where there are 6 million people considered officially as slum dwellers settled on the land 
without legal title (the places they live are left blank on all maps of the city). With the attempt to turn 
Mumbai into a global financial center to rival Shanghai, the property development boom gathers pace and 
the land the slum dwellers occupy appears increasingly valuable. The value of the land in Dharavi, one of 
the most prominent slums in Mumbai, is put at $2 billion and the pressure to clear the slum (for 
environmental and social reasons that mask the land grab) is mounting daily. Financial powers backed by 
the state push for forcible slum clearance, in some cases violently taking possession of a terrain occupied 
for a whole generation by the slum dwellers. Capital accumulation on the land through real estate activity 
booms as land is acquired at almost no cost. Will the people displaced get compensation? The lucky ones 
get a bit. But while the Indian constitution specifies that the state has the obligation to protect the lives and 
well-being of the whole population irrespective of caste and class, and to guarantee rights to livelihood 
housing and shelter, the Indian Supreme Court has issued both non-judgments and judgments that re-write 
this constitutional requirement. Since slum dwellers are illegal occupants and many cannot definitively 
prove their long-term residence on the land, they have no right to compensation. To concede that right, 
says the Supreme Court, would be tantamount to rewarding pickpockets for their actions. So the slum-
dwellers either resist and fight or move with their few belongings to camp out on the highway margins or 
wherever they can find a tiny space.20 Similar examples of dispossession (though less brutal and more 
legalistic) can be found in the United States through the abuse of rights of eminent domain to displacelong-
term residents in reasonable housing in favor of higher order land uses (such as condominiums and box 
stores). Challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court, the liberal justices carried the day against the conservatives 
in saying it was perfectly constitutional for local jurisdictions to behave in this way in order to increase 
their property tax base. 
In Seoul in the 1990s, the construction companies and developers hired goon squads of sumo 
wrestler types to invade whole neighborhoods and smash down with sledgehammers not only the housing 
but also all the possessions of those who had built their own housing on the hillsides of the city in the 1950s 
on what had become by the 1990s high value land. Most of those hillsides are now covered with highrise 
towers that show no trace of the brutal processes of land clearance that permitted their construction. In 
China millions are being dispossessed of the spaces they have long occupied (three million in Beijing 
alone). Lacking private property rights, the state can simply remove them from the land by fiat offering a 
minor cash payment to help them on their way (before turning the land over to developers at a high rate of 
profit). In some instances people move willingly but widespread resistances are also reported, the usual 
response to which is brutal repression by the Communist party. In the Chinese case it is often populations 
on the rural margins who are displaced illustrating the significance of Lefebvre’s argument, presciently laid 
out in the 1960s, that the clear distinction that once existed between the urban and the rural was gradually 
fading into a set of porous spaces of uneven geographical development under the hegemonic command of 
 12 
capital and the state. This is the case also in India, where the special economic development zones policy 
now favored by central and state governments is leading to violence against agricultural producers, the 
grossest of which was the massacre at Nandigram in West Bengal, orchestrated by the ruling Marxist 
political party, to make way for large scale Indonesian capital that is as much interested in urban property 
development as it is in industrial development. Private property rights in this case provided no protection. 
And so it is with the seemingly progressive proposal of awarding private property rights to squatter 
populations in order to offer them the assets that will permit them to emerge out of poverty. This is the sort 
of proposal now mooted for Rio’s favelas, but the problem is that the poor, beset with insecurity of income 
and frequent financial difficulties, can easily be persuaded to trade in that asset for a cash payment at a 
relatively low price (the rich typically refuse to give up their valued assets at any price which is why Moses 
could take a meat axe to the low-income Bronx but not to affluent Park Avenue). My bet is that, if present 
trends continue, within fifteen years all those hillsides in Rio now occupied by favelas will be covered by 
high-rise condominiums with fabulous views over the fabled bay while the erstwhile favela dwellers will 
have filtered off to live in some remote periphery.21 The long-term effect of Margaret Thatcher’s 
privatization of social housing in central London has been to create a rent and housing price structure 
throughout the metropolitan area that precludes lower income and now even middle class people having 
access to housing anywhere near the urban center. 
 Urbanization we may conclude has played a crucial role in the absorption of capital surpluses and 
has done so at every increasing geographical scales but at the price of burgeoning processes of creative 
destruction that entail the dispossession of the urban masses of any right to the city whatsoever. The planet 
of slums collides with the planet as a vast building site. Periodically this ends in revolt, as the dispossessed 
in Paris rose up in 1871, seeking to reclaim the city they had lost. The urban social movements of the 
1960s (in the US after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968) likewise sought to define a 
different way of urban living from that which was being imposed upon them by capitalist developers and 
the state. If, as seems likely, the fiscal difficulties in the current conjuncture mount and the hitherto 
successful neoliberal, postmodernist and consumerist phase of capitalist absorption of the surplus through 
urbanization is at an end and a broader crisis ensues, then the question arises: where is our ’68 or, even 
more dramatically, our version of the Commune? 
As with the fiscal system, the answer is bound to be much more complex precisely because the urban 
process is now global in scope. Signs of revolt are everywhere (the unrest in China and India is chronic, 
civil wars rage in Africa, Latin America is in ferment, autonomy movements are emerging all over the 
place, and even In the United States the political signs suggest that most of the population is saying 
“enough is enough” with respect to the rabid inequalities). Any of these revolts could suddenly become 
contagious. Unlike the fiscal system, however, the urban and peri-urban social movements of opposition, of 
which there are many around the world, are not tightly coupled at all. Indeed many have no connection to 
each other. But if they did somehow come together, then what should they demand? 
 13 
The answer to the last question is simple enough in principle: greater democratic control over the 
production and use of the surplus. Since the urban process is a major channel of use, then the right to the 
city is constituted by establishing democratic control over the deployment of the surpluses through 
urbanization. To have a surplus product is not a bad thing: indeed, in many situations a surplus is crucial to 
adequate survival. Throughout capitalist history, some of the surplus value created has been taxed away by 
the state and in social democratic phases that proportion rose significantly putting much of the surplus 
under state control. The whole neoliberal project over the last thirty years has been oriented towards 
privatization of control over the surplus. The data for all OECD countries show, however, that the share of 
gross output taken by the state has been roughly constant since the 1970s. The main achievement of the 
neoliberal assault, then, has been to prevent the state share expanding in the way it was in the 1960s. One 
further response has been to create new systems of governance that integrate state and corporate interests 
and, through the application of money power, assure that control over the disbursement of the surplus 
through the state apparatus favors corporate capital (like Halliburton) and the upper classes in the shaping 
of the urban process. Increasing the share of the surplus under state control will only work if the state itself 
is brought back under democratic control. 
Increasingly, we see the right to the city falling into the hands of private or quasi-private interests. In 
New York City, for example, we have a billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who is re-shaping the city 
after his heart’s desire along lines favorable to the developers, to Wall Street and transnational capitalist 
class elements, while continuing to sell the city as an optimal location for high value businesses and a 
fantastic destination for tourists, thus turning Manhattan in effect into one vast gated community for the 
rich. He refuses to subsidize businesses to come to New York City saying that if they are the kind of 
business that needs a subsidy to be in this high cost but high quality location then we do not want them. He 
has not said the same of people but this is the principle applied inpractice. In Seattle, a billionaire like Paul 
Allen calls the shots and in Mexico City the wealthiest man in the world, Carlos Slim, has the downtown 
streets re-cobbled to suit the tourist gaze. And it is not only affluent individuals that exercise direct power. 
In the town of New Haven, strapped for any resources for urban reinvestment of its own, it is Yale 
University, one of the wealthiest universities in the world, that is redesigning much of the urban fabric to 
suit its needs. Johns Hopkins is doing the same for East Baltimore and Columbia University plans to do so 
for areas of New York (sparking neighborhood resistance movements in both cases). The right to the city, 
as it is now constituted, is far too narrowly confined, in most cases in the hands of a small political and 
economic elite who are in the position to shape the city more and more after then own particular heart’s 
desire. 
In January every year an estimate is published of the total of Wall Street bonuses earned for all the 
hard work the financiers engaged in the previous year. In 2007, a disastrous year for financial markets by 
any measure, the bonuses added up to $33.2 billion, only 2 per cent less than the year before. In mid-
summer of 2007, the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank pumped billions of short-term credit 
into the financial system to ensure its stability and thereafter the Federal Reserve dramatically lowered 
 14 
interest rates or pumped in vast amounts of liquidity every time the Wall Street markets threatened to fall 
precipitously. Meanwhile, some two million people, mainly women single headed households and African 
Americans in central cities and marginalized white populations in the urban semi-periphery, have been or 
are about to be rendered homeless by foreclosures. Many city neighborhoods and even whole peri-urban 
communities in the US, have been boarded up and vandalized, wrecked by the predatory lending practices 
of the financial institutions. This population is due no bonuses. Indeed, since foreclosure means 
forgiveness of debt and that is regarded as income in the United States, many of those foreclosed face a 
hefty income tax bill for money they never had in their possession. 
This awful asymmetry cannot be construed as anything less than a massive form of class 
confrontation. It then poses the following question: why could not the Federal Reserve extend medium-
term liquidity help to the two million threatened households to forestall most of the foreclosures until 
mortgage restructuring could resolve much of the problem? The ferocity of the credit crisis would have 
been mitigated and impoverished people and the neighborhoods they inhabited would have been protected. 
To be sure, this would extend the mission of the Federal Reserve beyond its normal remit and interfere with 
the neoliberal rules of income distribution and personal responsibility. But it would also have prevented the 
unfolding of that “financial Katrina,” which conveniently (for the developers) threatens to wipe out low 
income neighborhoods on potentially high-value land in many inner city areas far more effectively and 
speedily than could be achieved through eminent domain. The social to say nothing of economic price we 
are paying for the observing of such rules and the senseless creative destruction they engender is enormous. 
We have, however, yet to see a coherent oppositional movement to all of this in the twenty-first 
century. There are, of course, multitudes of diverse social movements focusing on the urban question 
already in existence – from India and Brazil to China, Spain, Argentina and the United States - including a 
nascent right to the city movement. The problem is that they have yet to converge on the singular aim of 
gaining greater control over the uses of the surplus (let alone over the conditions of its production). At this 
point in history this has to be a global struggle predominantly with finance capital for that is the scale at 
which urbanization processes are now working. To be sure, the political task of organizing such a 
confrontation is difficult if not daunting. But the opportunities are multiple in part because, as this brief 
history of capitalist urbanization shows, again and again crises erupt either locally (as in land and property 
markets in Japan in 1989 or as in the Savings and Loan crisis in the United States of 1987-90) or globally 
(as in 1973 or now) around the urbanization process, and in part because the urban is now the point of 
massive collision – dare we call it class struggle? - between the accumulation by dispossession being 
visited upon the slums and the developmental drive that seeks to colonize more and more urban space for 
the affluent to take their urbane and cosmopolitan pleasures. One step towards unification of these 
struggles is to focus on the right to the city as both a working slogan and a political ideal, precisely because 
it focuses on who it is that commands the inner connection that has prevailed from time immemorial 
between urbanization and surplus production and use. The democratization of the right to the city and the 
construction of a broad social movement to enforce its will is imperative, if the dispossessed are to take 
 15 
back control of the city from which they have for so long been excluded and if new modes of controlling 
capital surpluses as they work through urbanization processes are to be instituted. Lefebvre was right to 
insist that the revolution has to be urban, in the broadest sense of that term, or nothing at all. 
 
 
 
Notes 
1. Park, R., On Social Control and Collective Behavior, Chicago, Chicago University Press, p.3. 
2 Engels, F., The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Oxford, Blackwell, 1952; 
Simmel, G. “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Levine, D. (ed.) On Individuality and Social Forms, 
Chicago, Chicago University Press, 324-39. 
3 Davis, M., Planet of Slums, London, Verso, 2006. 
4 Perceptive critics will doubtless note that each of the barriers to capital accumulation enumerated in 
this highly simplified account roughly corresponds to a particular theory of crisis: labor constraints lead to 
profit squeeze theories; natural resource constraints lead to O’Connor’s “second contradiction of 
capitalism;” excessive or imbalanced technological changes generate falling rates of profit (and ruinous 
competition); lack of markets indicates an under-consumption problem. My own simplified view is that 
crises can and do take on all of these forms in particular historical and geographical situations and that all 
of these barriers can sometimes be implicated even as one might stand out as the main problem to be 
confronted (as, e.g. Reagan and Thatcher evidently thought it fundamental to confront the power of labor in 
the early 1980s whereas now the problem mainly lies in credit-fuelled consumption that is breaking down 
and threatening shrinking effective demand). 
5 This account is based on Harvey, D.. Paris, Capital of Modernity, New York, Routledge, 2003. 
6 Moses, R., “What Happened to Haussmann?” Architectural Forum, 77, 1942, 1-10. 
7 Lefebvre, H., The Urban Revolution, Minneapolis, Minnesota University Press, 2003; Writing on 
Cities, Oxford, Blackwell, 1996. 
8 Tabb, W., The Long Default: New York City and the Urban Fiscal Crisis, New York, Monthly Review 
Press, 1982. 
9 Harvey, D., A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005, chapter 5. 
10 Caro, R., The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, New York, Knopf, 1974; 
Ballon, H. and Jackson, K., Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of NewYork, New 
York, Norton, 2007. 
11 Bookstaber, R., A Demon of our own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial 
Innovation, Hoboken, NJ., Wiley, 2007. 
12 Nafstad, H., Blakar, R., Carlquist, E., Phelps, J., and Rand-Hendrikson, K., ”Ideology and Power: The 
Influence of Current Neo-liberalism in Society,” Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 
17, 2007, 313-27. 
 16 
13 Davis, M. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, London, Verso, 1990. 
14 See Harvey, D., op.cit. chapter 2. 
15 Balbo, M. cited in National Research Council, Cities Transformed: Demographic Change and Its 
Implications in the Developing World, Washington, D.C., The National Academies Press, 2003, p.379. 
16 Engels, F. The Housing Question, New York, International Publishers, 1935 edition, 74-7. 
17 Berman M., All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1982. 
18 Engels, F. op.cit.(1935), 23. 
19 Harvey, D., The New Imperialism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003, chapter 4. 
20 Ramanathan, U., “Illegality and the Urban Poor,” Economic and Political Weekly, 41, no.29, July 22, 
2006; Shukla, R., “Rights of the Poor: An Overview of the Supreme Court,” Economic and Political 
Weekly, 41, no.35, September 2, 2006. 
21 A lot of this thinking follows the work of Hernan de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism 
Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, New York, Basic Books, 2000; see the critical 
examination by Mitchell, T., “The Work of Economics: How a Discipline Makes its World,” Archives 
Européennes de Sociologie, 46, 2005, 297-320. 
.